What are China’s intentions in building Shaksgam Valley road? Not security, look to politics

Protests by the MEA help, at best, to keep the Indian stance alive. To expect anything else would be unreasonable.

China’s road-building capability and intentions in the Himalayas were highlighted recently through a post on X by researcher Nature Desai. Utilising satellite imagery, he argued that China has built a road across the Aghil Pass, located at a height of 4,805 m, and entered the lower Shaksgam Valley. The roadhead is now less than 30 miles from the Siachen Glacier. This triggered speculation in the Indian media about China’s intentions and capabilities regarding the potential collusive threat posed by China and Pakistan to India’s defences in the Siachen Glacier region.

The Ministry of External Affairs’ (MEA) official reaction was to lodge a protest based on its position that it never accepted Pakistan’s ceding of Shaksgam Valley to China through the 1963 border agreement. Similar protests were lodged in whenever China’s road-building and other activities had come to light.

Some strategic questions emerge: What are China’s intentions? Does it have the capability to build a road that traverses extremely high altitudes and glaciated terrain?

Considering the nature of the terrain and China’s road-building capability, it is definitely an uphill task, but the fact that they are building the road is indicative that Beijing perceives that it can be done and would, in the long run, be aided by the impact of climate change that is melting the glaciers. The degree of difficulty will also be dictated by the direction of the road, which, in turn, will be dictated by China’s intentions.

What are China’s intentions?

The road has been in the making for several years. In May 2018, an article in Swarajya attempted to answer whether China’s road-building in the Shaksgam Valley posed a threat to Siachen. The article provided a detailed exposition of the geography and its implications, embellished with maps. It concluded: “The Chinese road at this point does not pose any threat to Indian positions on Siachen or anywhere else on the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Will it pose a military threat in the future? That depends on the Chinese objectives. Technically, they can mount a physical assault on Siachen Glacier from the north, but it will require substantial investment in infrastructure and manpower. And it will take some time to build up any credible capability. India would have sufficient time to respond to any such a development.”

The current spotlight on China’s road-building activities in the Shaksgam Valley has generated another view. Aired as a podcast on YouTube through his Gunners Shot channel, Lt Gen PR Shankar (Retired), former Director General of Artillery and currently a professor of Practice at IIT Madras, has made a convincing case that the Aghil Pass road-building is connected to China’s efforts to create an alternative road to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). With elaborate use of maps and skilful interpretation of terrain, he focuses on the probable Chinese intentions. The main argument is that China’s careful analysis of the terrain has indicated the feasibility of building a bypass to the CPEC, however challenging and time-consuming it might be.

The analysis of various pertinent factors points to the endeavour of road-building over the Aghil Pass into the Shaksgam Valley being part of resurrecting an old route that connected Yarkand in Xinjiang to Skardu in Kashmir. The Xinjiang-Tibet Highway, built in 1956, commences in Yecheng/Yarkand and heads south and west, across Aksai Chin and into central Tibet. The next phase indicates the construction of bridges at various locations for the road over the Muztagh Pass. However, there are three to four glaciers en route, and they pose challenges that will not be easily surmountable. The difficulty could be eased, though, depending upon the pace of glacier melting. In sum, the Yarkand-Skardu link to act as a viable bypass to the CPEC is unlikely within the next decade, if not longer. (See maps below).

Connecting the dots

Most infrastructure-building in Tibet would be of interest for India’s strategic planners to monitor and assess. However, in terms of assessing threat potential, abstracting threats from the political context and China’s objectives could lead one astray and is likely to lead to expending meagre resources on unproductive ventures.

Framing the building of roads in the Shaksgam Valley as a threat to India’s defence of the Siachen Glacier is a case in point. This is because the glaciated terrain in the vicinity of any approach from the direction of the Shaksgam Valley to the northern part of the Siachen Glacier at Indra Col is certainly not favourable for launching an offensive with a reasonably-sized force. More importantly, it will require logistics support of a magnitude that could deter any such attempt. The vulnerabilities of humans and equipment to the merciless climatic conditions of extremely high altitudes are not easily amenable to technological solutions.

On the contrary, in comparative terms, it would be better to isolate the forces deployed on the Siachen Glacier by launching an offensive over the Saser Pass on the Karakoram Range. Here too, sustaining such forces will be extremely difficult and would consume a lot of infantry trained in high-altitude warfare, which China does not have and is unlikely to have. Notably, none of these imagined threats dovetail into any of China’s contemporary political objectives.

The contemporary political objectives are more related to posing threats by infrastructure-building and salami slicing, wherever and whenever possible. The strategic objective is to tie up India’s meagre resources on the northern border. This is supplemented by expanding influence in Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. These attempts are expected to contain India within the subcontinent so that its emergence as a maritime power is weakened and delayed. This is because it is in the maritime space that China is strategically vulnerable in the context of the evolving global geopolitical confrontation.

The roads in the Shaksgam Valley are not per se a military threat to India’s security, though prudence dictates continuous monitoring. Instead, they have political implications due to the illegal ceding of Indian territory by Pakistan to China. Therefore, protests by the MEA help, at best, to keep the Indian stance alive. To expect anything else from MEA protests would be unreasonable.

Lt Gen (Dr) Prakash Menon (retd) is Director, Strategic Studies Programme, Takshashila Institution; former military adviser, National Security Council Secretariat. He tweets @prakashmenon51. Views are personal.